It is always good to understand the basics before using framework tools but once you are up and running, it may be worth looking into Yeoman.io and the Jekyll generator

It will scaffold out your Jekyll site and also livereload your page when you save files (saving that trip to F5) and optimise your build when you are ready to push to github. It has improved my workflow greatly. It can take some effort to set up but even I got it running on Windows, and I’m an idiot! :-)

I am excited to try Jekyll. Working on this tutorial now. I have successfully installed Jekyll and installed the documents into an orphan git branch. I have “Jekyll serve —watch” running. I can see Jekyll updating in the terminal whenever I make a change in the folder.

Where I am stuck is that http://localhost:4000/ is not found in my browser. I get `/’ not found. I’m searching for a way to get it working and navigate to my project folder via localhost:4000/

I make a service that is similar to GitHub pages, but without the git portion. It relies on Dropbox, so you just save files (or generate from Jekyll) in Dropbox, and it goes live. It’s called paperplane.io. We use a similar approach described here to manage our own blog: http://blog.paperplane.io, and it works well for us.

Wow, this is exactly what I was looking for. I’ve been trying to build a website using github pages but I got stuck on the problem of including headers and footers. Thanks so much for spelling it all out.

Thanks for the article. I’d reached my limit with Wordpress after my site was hacked ( again ). Plus I prefer working with HTML, CSS and JS directly, not via PHP, so I was genuinely excited to learn about github pages last week, and have just started building my site there.

I’m experimenting with using Google Spreadsheets combined with TableTop.js to power my blogs. I can write blog entries in markdown in a spreadsheet and use TableTop to read them. I like the potential and flexibility – something of a test for now.

Nice writeup. I wish it existed when I first worked this all out. Maybe beyond the scope of this article but if you are throwing recipes onto the Internet you can mark them up super nicely with Microdata / Rich Snippets. Check out:

Cool I wish I read this when I made mine. morenoh149.github.io I used bootstrap as well the source is here https://github.com/morenoh149/morenoh149.github.io I just push to master and it works for me. Don’t know why you had to change the default.

I had trouble with installing Jekyll though, because of the librari nikigiri (or something like that). I installed homebrew, and then I needed to change the permissions on /usr/local to my current user, unlink the libdiv (or something like that) library and upgrade it. Then, it finally worked.

Also, I needed to restart Jekyll after I changed the .yml configuration of the sub-folder for the site, or else it wouldn’t work.

And, the folder _includes already existed and contained header.html, head.html and footer.html. I deleted them to create the file you mentioned.

But, again, really well written and easy to follow tutorial. I’ll keep it as an example for my own blog! :) Congrats Anna!